


cold.

by foundCarcosa



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Cold War, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 10:33:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5663104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a short discourse, a glimpse of what lay beneath; a small slice of what it was like, for both of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cold.

Someone, someone inquisitive like Feliciano or maybe Berwald, had once asked him why he clung so tenaciously to Alaska. It would have been so easy to cede it to Canada, it seemed -- easy to everyone but Alfred.

It was Ivan who had sold it to him, an imperious Ivan with glittering eyes and hands like talons, who had whispered to him because he’d thought the young Alfred wouldn’t understand — _One day, I will rule. Me. And no one else, no, not even you._

It was difficult to comprehend, now, why Alfred still remembered Ivan the way he’d been, eyes like gemstones and skin like snow, the spectre of his eternal guardian swirling around him like an icy wind. Ivan had been young then, too. They’d all changed, all of them, Arthur becoming sour and indolent, Sadik becoming uncertain and broody, and Alfred becoming desperate and brash. He knew he’d changed. Why, then, should he have been so surprised to watch from the Alaskan peninsula as Ivan became reclusive and suspicious, his insolent smile twisting into a petulant frown, his tall, gaunt body becoming stooped and rounded, taloned hands loosening into effete and grasping fists?

Alfred’s love had not been enough for Ivan, as Ivan had poor grasp upon love. Winter loved him, and his people loved him, but their love was thin and tenacious, like gossamer in a great wind. Hatred, however, brought the cunning glitter back into the broad nation’s eyes — hatred he understood, for he felt it for himself first.

“The boots of millions of proletariats march within me,” Ivan whispered, his voice thick and unctuous, and Alfred did not fight his urge to flinch away. “They come for you, too. I hear the echo in you, the want for what we have.”

“You have nothing,” Alfred retorted, his eyes inscrutable behind clouded lenses. “What would we want from you? The world is changing. There is no room for you.”

“You think so?” Ivan stood, his arms spread wide. “What we bring is inevitable, comrade. You will come to us, and beg for forgiveness, but our boots will march over you, and there will be no more talk between us. Only the might of the USSR, a triumph over you.”

“You think you’re the only one who can be cold, Ivan?” Alfred stood as well, his shoulders thrown back in defiance, spots of lividity high on his cheeks, his fists clenched. The imperiousness was in _his_ eyes now, in the shadows thick under his cheekbones and in the ghost of old England in the jut of his jaw, and for the most fleeting of moments, Ivan felt the warm rush of fear — fear, tinged with the sharp and motivating pain of loss. “Don’t think I never learned from you, _comrade.”_

People called it a Cold War because that is what it was, but they had no idea.


End file.
